Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Friends Warm the Soul

Friends come in all shapes in sizes. They also come at all times in your life.

My oldest friends, as in my friends from childhood, have mostly reappeared on Facebook. Some I lost touch with along the way, others like my friend Melissa I consider more of a sister.

I have my college friends, my grad school friends, my friends from Maine, my friends from the Cape, friends that I met through my girls; I am lucky to have so many friends.

After a certain point in your life, it is hard to make new friends. You get involved with your children's lives and live vicariously through them. You may have "couple friends" that you go out to dinner with, but when you get divorced you become a hanging chad. The couple has to pick one side or the other. You may get lucky like I did and become great friends with 2 couples that rented your house for 3 years and even though you only see them once a year, you would drop anything for them if they needed you.

Thankfully, very thankfully, blogging has brought me a whole new group of friends. When I went to my first blogging conference in 2009 in Chicago, I went without personally meeting any of the women I was staying with. However, because I had been reading their blogs, I felt like I knew them better than some of my friends that live in the same town as me!

This past weekend, I was able to bring one of my "blog" friends into my "real" world. When my swim team friends heard I was bringing a blogger to B's swim meet, they were very excited! They already felt like they knew Liz through reading her comments on my posts or Facebook! (You can read about Liz's rendition of our weekend here and here.) I'll have to write my own rebuttal to her posts tomorrow.